We built the tool we wished existed in every kitchen we've worked near.

Founder's story

Isabella Russo

I grew up in a family that was always in and around restaurants. Not as owners at first — as the people who kept them running. Suppliers, line cooks, floor managers. NYC restaurant culture was part of how I understood work before I understood business.

After college I spent several years working in restaurant operations roles at independent groups in the West Village and SoHo — the kind of spots where the BOH chef is in by 5am and the last person to leave is doing inventory counts at midnight. I was not a cook. I was the person trying to figure out why food cost was running 4% over theoretical every third week.

Every single one of those kitchens ran on paper. Prep lists on yellow legal pads. Temperature logs in spiral notebooks that lived on the corner of the pass-through window. Par levels in someone's head — specifically in the head of the chef who had been there longest. When that person left, the knowledge evaporated. One group I worked with had a chef leave mid-season and spent six weeks rebuilding prep schedules that should have taken a day to replicate.

The larger groups I observed had figured out a version of this — detailed SOPs, typed prep sheets, something resembling a digital HACCP log. But that discipline was only accessible at a certain scale. A three-location independent group didn't have an ops director building systems. They had a working chef who was also doing ordering, scheduling, and training new hires who had never heard the term mise en place.

I founded Prepcadence in 2023 to close that gap. Not with generic business software adapted for kitchens, but with something designed around how BOH prep actually works — by station, by day-part, by par level, by CCP. Built by someone who has done a Monday morning inventory count at 6am and knows exactly what it feels like when the walk-in is a mess and service starts in four hours.